Drive-by fruiting

On Tuesday, I suffered my first drive-by fruiting. Not a pleasant experience. As I stood saying goodbyes outside my local gay pub, two Mensa candidates drove by and threw a piece of fruit from the window while cheering, hitting me square in the chest. Eager to give them the benefit of the doubt, I thought they must have tossed an apple out of the window and not realised that there were people in the way. A look in the gutter, and a sad look back at the folks outside as I broke the news. “It’s a tomato.” They had brought it with them especially to throw.

Men, women, and the Picachu gimp

On Wednesday, undeterred by the homophobia of the night before, I headed down to Trannyshack’s 4th birthday party at Madame Jojo’s in Soho. This is the place where people come to dress up and be seen, to apply their best face and defy the attitudes of the idiots. Some are happy to dress like women, or men, or transvestites, and some like weird cartoon gimps from Japan. After long, I had stopped trying to figure out who was male and who was female, thanking my lucky stars that I hadn’t stumbled in here with the horn. On another day, I would have gone with at least half a dozen of these beautiful trannies. But not the Picachu gimp, who just scared the life out of me.

For jokes, I made advances on my friend and aspiring straight fella, Martin Langmead, to see if he could be lured out of queer denial by the room of mutated gender. “Stop trying to queer me up!” he shrieked, hiding his sexuality behind a thick veneer of masculine bravado.

Walking around inside Trannyshack is to stroll through a forest of bizarre human wonder. I found a cast of real life pantomime characters inside an old Parisian boudoir, and they were happy to pose for pictures. This is what I saw.

P.S. This man told me that he was Brian Molko from Placebo, and I believed him. I thought he don’t half look good for 36, but he’s a pop star, it’s his job to look better than the rest of us could dream of looking at their age. But after consulting with some people who know their Placebo, it turns out that it may not be him. If anyone wants to have their twopenny’s worth in the ‘Is it him ? Isn’t it him?’ debate, leave a comment below.